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Nordic Chef Explores Backyard

The chef René Redzepi’s restaurant is gaining global attention and acclaim.Credit
Erik Refner for The New York Times

LAMMEFJORDEN, Denmark

WHEN a cook is said to be in the weeds, it usually means he is tangled up in too many orders coming at him too fast.

But on a recent afternoon on the seashore here about an hour’s drive from Copenhagen, the Danish chef René Redzepi was, quite literally, in the weeds. Up to his knees. And what he was doing was snacking. Browsing. Like a rabbit, albeit a rabbit in charge of a restaurant that has set the culinary world abuzz.

Treating the windswept brush as an unkempt salad bar, he plucked a thin green blade.

“This is how the Vikings got their vitamin C,” he said. “It’s called scurvy grass. It has a horseradish tone.”

So it did, and the wild garden sorrel that he found seconds later tasted every bit as sharp and lemony as he had promised. For 15 minutes he and a companion nibbled on various petals, leaves and shoots, attracting stares from onlookers in a campground nearby, who no doubt wondered at their sanity and zest for roughage.

“So much of what you see here, it’s edible,” said Mr. Redzepi, who regularly dispatches his staff to collect the scurvy grass and sorrel, as well as what he called sea coriander, beach mustard and bellflowers. All of these make their way into his dishes, along with puffin eggs from Iceland and musk-ox meat from Greenland.

He is omnivorous in his exoticism, but restrictive in his geography. If the Nordic region doesn’t yield it, Mr. Redzepi doesn’t serve it, with rare exceptions (coffee, say, or chocolate).

That approach might well seem a recipe for obscurity, which is what many chefs, diners and critics predicted for his restaurant, Noma, when it opened in Copenhagen in 2003.

“You have to understand how hard it was for them at the start,” said Daniella Illerbrand, the general manager of Mathias Dahlgren, a restaurant in Stockholm. “People didn’t understand what he was cooking. They wanted foie gras. He gave them cloudberries.”

Seven years later, Noma is an international sensation, as is Mr. Redzepi, 32. On a trip to New York early last month to promote his cookbook, “Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine,” to be published by Phaidon Press in the fall, he was treated to a hero’s welcome from some of the city’s most celebrated chefs: Dan Barber, Daniel Humm, David Chang, Paul Liebrandt, Wylie Dufresne. (Mr. Chang and Mr. Dufresne have, over the last few years, become close friends with him.) “Nightline” taped a segment with him, and he was invited to sit in that somber, ennobling darkness otherwise known as the set of “Charlie Rose.”

The following week, when he had returned to Copenhagen, the stream of visitors into Noma included the chefs of two restaurants in Spain with three Michelin stars apiece (Noma has two) and a sommelier from the Chicago restaurant Alinea. An assistant to the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten called to ask if Mr. Vongerichten and three companions could come in for lunch the next day. Mr. Redzepi paced the Noma kitchen nervously trying to figure out some way to fit them in, but couldn’t.

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A dish of pickled vegetables, smoked bone marrow, flowers and herbs.Credit
Erik Refner for The New York Times

“We have to come up with some kind of system,” he said, sighing heavily. Noma books up three months in advance, and with just 12 tables accommodating 40 or so guests, it doesn’t have much wiggle room.

A fair share of the demand and attention flows from Noma’s anointment in April as the best restaurant in the world, at least according to an annual poll of food writers, prominent restaurateurs and other industry insiders conducted by San Pellegrino, the Italian mineral-water company. Most years, the survey draws little notice. But when it lifts an establishment in tiny, wintry Denmark above legends like El Bulli in Spain and the Fat Duck in England, there’s considerably more chatter.

Denmark, after all, isn’t Provence or Catalonia. For a locavore chef, in particular, it has limitations. But Mr. Redzepi has air-dried, pickled, cured, foraged and researched his way around them. He has taken what could be a set of ankle weights and turned them into wings, his culinary accomplishments drawing all the more regard for the degree of geographical difficulty built into them.

“There’s so much more out there than we realize,” he said over a lunch after his nature expedition, referring to what can be harvested not just in Scandinavia but almost anywhere.

The lunch, it should be said, was in an old-style Danish restaurant and consisted of old-style Danish food: pickled herring, rye bread, smoked halibut, rye bread, smoked salmon and more rye bread, with beers and shots of aquavit liberally thrown in. Mr. Redzepi is no purist and no saint.

At Noma, he said, “We’re not trying to change the world, and I’m not being judgmental.”

He is, instead, acting on the premise that the most special, inimitable contribution a restaurant can make is to serve the food that is freshest and truest on its given patch of the planet, to sift through that region’s flora and fauna for unfamiliar flavors, to scour its forgotten traditions for ingredients that cooks have stopped using. (Mr. Redzepi works with two Danish food historians.)

A visitor to Noma is likely to be introduced to the peculiar astringency of sea buckthorn, an orange berry with an outrageous tang. Mr. Redzepi pairs a pulp of air-dried sea buckthorn with pickled rose hips in one amuse-bouche. It’s colorful, eccentric, absorbing.

He makes a gallery of ersatz capers by pickling, for example, the buds of ramson flowers, which have a potently garlicky perfume and taste.

Danes long ago used the ashes of hay as a seasoning, so Mr. Redzepi does, too: they smell vaguely of popcorn, and have accessorized both an egg dish and one with king crab.

Does all this sound too insistently and grimly botanical? It isn’t. Noma wouldn’t be getting all this international love if Mr. Redzepi weren’t as amply devoted to the pleasure principle as to anything else; if he weren’t such an intelligent and extensively trained cook; and if he didn’t take such lavish advantage of the amazing seafood all around him.

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Root vegetables are served in a pot whose “soil’’ is made of malt and hazelnut flour.Credit
Erik Refner for The New York Times

One of his signature starters combines long, thin tubes of parsley-encased razor-clam flesh with what he calls “snow” of frozen, grated horseradish and an emerald juice of parsley and clam that, when poured onto the plate at table side, skitters and bubbles and eddies and swirls like something on a microscope slide.

The dish’s marriage of brine and zing calls to mind wasabi-seasoned sushi or shrimp cocktail, but is cleaner, brighter, sharper and more elaborately choreographed than either.

Since he interprets “local” in a more ethnically thematic than literal way, the fellow Nordic country of Iceland is fair game, and that’s where he gets fat, exquisite langoustine tails. They are cooked only briefly on a plancha, then served amid dabs of emulsified oyster purée and drifts of seaweed powder on hefty, craggy rocks instead of plates. A diner is denied utensils and instructed to use fingers to drag the langoustine through its ablutions.

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Mr. Redzepi likes to have people eat with their hands and creates a kind of theater at Noma that underscores the connection he wants them to feel to nature — and that has the deliberate side benefit of being great fun. He presents root vegetables in a flowerpot whose “soil” is a layer of malt and hazelnut flour over an emulsion of sheep’s-milk yogurt, tarragon and other herbs that functions as a dip. It’s crudités a different way. A dish of shrimp and sea urchin powder, meanwhile, is arranged as a beachscape with scattered stones and tufts of grass.

Cooks regularly stray from the crowded, relatively cramped kitchen into the dining room to deliver and explain the dishes. Mr. Redzepi contends that this practice, along with the cooks’ foraging responsibilities, deepens their respect for and investment in what they’re preparing. There are typically some two dozen — more than one for every two customers — pinging about, and because they come from a half-dozen countries, English is the kitchen’s official language.

Mr. Redzepi was born and spent most of his childhood in Copenhagen, where his father, an immigrant from Macedonia, drove a cab and his mother, who is Danish, worked as a cleaning lady. At 15, instead of continuing with academic studies, he chose to go to a restaurant trade school simply because a friend was going there, too. He wasn’t sure if he was on a path to become a restaurant manager, a waiter or a cook.

But then he discovered a talent and, more than that, a passion at the stove. He went from school to a world-class restaurant in France and from there to El Bulli. What that famously experimental restaurant taught him, he said, was that rules could be tossed merrily out the window.

“I didn’t come back to Denmark thinking, I’m going to put a gel of a gel of a gel on my monkfish liver while I whip my guests with burning rosemary,” he said. “I just came back with a sense of freedom.”

Later he traveled to California to work for a few months under Thomas Keller at the French Laundry. He absorbed the chef’s famous perfectionism, manifest in the spotless order of the Noma kitchen and in a tableau that was repeated for minutes on end one recent night: a half-dozen rapt cooks folding and placing scores of individual leaves of wood sorrel just so over hand-shaved beef loin for Mr. Redzepi’s herbaceous version of steak tartare.

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“There’s so much more out there than we realize” that can be eaten, said Mr. Redzepi.Credit
Erik Refner for The New York Times

And Mr. Keller’s haute takes on such Americana as macaroni-and-cheese and Creamsicles suggested the possibilities of at once working within and reworking a country’s culinary heritage.

That’s what Noma is largely about, though it’s also about a relentless questioning of what should and can be eaten and whether the usual experience of an ingredient is in fact the best one.

During the months when the Nordic soil is stingy, Mr. Redzepi doesn’t just trot out the plants that he has had the good sense to pickle, smoke and such in advance. He wonders about the real potential of a potato or carrot.

That happened last winter, and from it came a dish of what he calls “vintage carrot,” which is an oversize carrot that spent much longer than usual in the ground and would be inedible raw. By roasting it in thick goat’s butter at a very low temperature for a very long time, he produces something meaty and mesmerizing, tasting partly of carrot, partly of beet, partly of turnip, partly of nothing remotely familiar.

“You can’t get that flavor from a new carrot,” he observed, adding: “How is a carrot supposed to taste? Perhaps the taste we’re getting is the original carrot.”

He recently discovered that a potato on the verge of rotting in the earth sprouts a network of smaller potatoes around it, and that these satellite parasites are tender beyond belief and redolent of hazelnuts. So he is working to persuade a local farmer not to uproot his spuds when he usually would.

“It’s like the caviar of potatoes,” he said. “It’s going to be much more expensive, because you can’t touch the field for two years.”

These renegade, cerebral experiments fascinate many of his peers. Mr. Chang said: “He could have cooked anything he wanted to. He’s well versed in high-end French, in progressive Spanish. But René said, ‘We’re going to focus on 53 or 58 indigenous horseradish plants in the Scandinavian region.’ I think that’s really brilliant.”

Mr. Chang also noted that Mr. Redzepi uses his so-called laboratory — a houseboat docked about 250 feet from the restaurant, with an upper deck that’s all kitchen — not to develop better gums and pastes but to put Nordic ingredients through dress rehearsals.

It’s where he and his team are working, for example, on a new venison dish. “We imagine ourselves being the deer,” he said. “What does it step on?”

His answer: snails and fiddlehead ferns. “The flavors will go together,” he said. “Snails and deer: they live together. They have a symbiosis.”

And so, he said, he has put in an order for 2,000 snails from some of the many professional foragers he uses to supplement what his cooks, on their days out of the kitchen, can scrounge up. He’ll no doubt capture one or two himself. It’s his instinct, his way.

A version of this article appears in print on July 7, 2010, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Nordic Chef Explores His Backyard. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe